


Introspect

by SunStoneSpark



Category: Farscape
Genre: 'Chiana realises she's bi - the fanfic', F/F, Implied/Referenced Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-25 00:16:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20367481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SunStoneSpark/pseuds/SunStoneSpark
Summary: Chiana's always known what do with men.It's women that are the problem.





	Introspect

**Author's Note:**

> Set nebulously from season 3's 'Fractures' (the one with the other PK prisoners, one of whom is a traitor) through season 4, so spoilers for all that

Chiana dreams of Hubero the first night she’s gone. It is a small, nonsensical dream, filled with neon colours and music that melts away the microt she comes to focus on it, but it is a _small _dream regardless. 

She wakes, panicked, like she’s forgotten something at the corner of her mind, and remembers Hubero from the dream, smiling and alive, her fellow Nebari beside her. The panic immediately stills to a fleeting moment of comfort, before sinking into despair. Chiana buries her face into her sheets and merely cries for arns. 

She knows throughout, that she’s over-reacting, that she knew her for a day, but she can’t shake the unwelcome grief from herself. It makes no sense, she chides herself again, to care this deeply for a woman she’d known for so little time when she’d made other friends who’d died just as suddenly after knowing them for longer. 

Chiana stops berating herself as badly when she realises it is less directly the woman she misses, and more the things associated with her. She’d had hope in there, for something, she didn’t know what. Hope tied to a friendly face, familiar with all her old plights. A chance for bigger and better, and new, and different, and acceptance. A chance to be fully understood. 

Then she just hated herself for planning anything at all. 

\-- 

In their days on Earth, Chiana finds herself watching a lot of television. Crichton jokes she has a fondness for_ soaps _, he calls them. The word feels wrong to her, freshly spoken from her own tongue. She enjoys them whenever she’s watching them, they’re almost violently moreish, but she still can't find any love for that word in that context. Desperate theatrical pieces on the disasters that comprise the daily lives of humans. She laughs and jokes and sometimes throws popped corn at the screen, but she's never sure if she likes the experience afterwards. 

_ Soaps. _

She tries the word again, a few more times, and decides that this experience is definitely not the cleansing one that should come with the name. She saw one a few days prior, witty and just like Crichton, filled with references she didn’t quite get. The humans didn’t seem such a bad bunch. This woman had been found dead in it, and suddenly the tone flipped. Crichton’d made a comment that it was a cheap political statement, and she’d shooed him off, legs curled up to her chest, eyes wide and utterly enthralled. 

The woman, Chiana finds out, was murdered because she’d been having a relationship with another woman. Chiana’s blood chills before she can say a word about why. 

After that, the humans don’t seem so good to her. 

\-- 

Back on Moya later that week, she can't shake the feeling, that feeling of sickening dread, of oppression. The words she’d heard hurled about, the disdainful stares and comments remind her of her own people, back in some sanitised control camp. She’d seen people taken for less than what she’d seen on those human televisions, had heard of people killed for even the smallest fraction of an impure thought. 

She hated that she’d phrased it like that. Impure. That was a disgusting word, a disgusting way to phrase something. 

Before she even realised what she’d done, Chiana had scuttled herself away into a small compartment of Moya, a little dead-end in a little corridor. It felt safe, secure, and defendable, she’d ended up there a few times before when she’d panicked and then realises that’s exactly what she’s doing again. 

“Pip?” 

Chiana glances up, wide dark eyes staring upwards at the man now blocking the corridor’s light. 

“You’ve been acting kind of funky since we came back. Just wanted to see if you’re okay.” 

He makes a meek gesture questioning if he could sit with her, and she obliges, shuffling over a little to give him space. 

“Hey, uh, Crichton, your, ah, your people.” She cocks her head to one side, and darts back to look at him. “They, uh. They’re not so good with...” She pauses blankly, failing to find the phrasing. Crichton’s no fool, but he also can't navigate a conversation in the dark. 

“They’re not good with a lot of things.” 

Chiana laughs at that, a strange peculiar, almost strangled noise that no longer alarms her human companion, but he recognises this particular instance as weak anyway. 

“Two women,” the Nebari starts fresh, “being together. They don’t like that.” 

Crichton huffs an acknowledging sigh. “They’re taking a while. Been a lot of social change in the past hundred years, Pip, they’ll come ‘round.” 

“How long’s your culture been there? How long they had brains good enough to talk about this?” 

There’s a silence between them for some time. Crichton knows the next time he speaks, he’ll merely confirm a mutual fear. 

“A while.” 

“Yeah, so. They’re not gonna come around to us, are they?” 

Crichton falters at the ambiguity in her reference, considering somewhat absentmindedly if she just came out to him or not. 

“Give ‘em a couple hundred years, maybe. Maybe longer. Never said this stuff happened fast.” 

“We’ll be dead.” 

“Yeah.” He replies, and the answer feels so empty to him. 

“Thought you liked them.” 

“I do.” 

“Their society seems kinda frelled to me.” Chiana laughs again, but her smile only graces her face superficially. Her eyes glimmer with movement as they flicker around, un-resting. 

They begin to speak at the same time, and Chiana yields immediately, only for Crichton to give her the space to continue. 

“I just don’t get it. This, this sorta prejudice? All these species, meeting each other out in space, and all these small minded little fekkiks are still trying to tear apart their own people.” She exhales, unblinkingly. “They’re all so _scared. _ All this stuff, all, _all this _, it shouldn’t matter.” 

Crichton doesn't argue, he doesn't have any reason to, and so the two of them just sit there, the soft sounds of Moya ebbing around them, pulsing through the floors and the curving, organic walls. Pilot addresses Crichton, and Chiana barely acknowledges the call, or the man in question leaving, after some sort of muted apology. She just nods in response, running her finger along a small crack in the floor beside her. It’s small, yet branches wide, and it’s not long before she loses herself in the motion of tracing it, letting her thoughts run rampant. 

\-- 

In some back alley, Chiana sees D’Argo. He’s standing there, with his back turned to her, and she runs to him, gravel turning to water under her feet. She sinks, plummeting immediately, enveloped by the ocean. It feels comforting, oddly, and suddenly she wants nothing more than to stay there forever, eyes shutting, peace overtaking her. She feels the waves wash around her, holding, protecting, until with a sick feeling, she’s tumbling, falling down the upturned corridors of Moya, slamming into supports as the ship rotates continuously to bring her down. 

There’s water down there, and she knows it somewhere deep inside, but now she’s unwilling. Now she can't go. There are things to do, and it washes over her more as a concept than any developed thought. She scrambles at the walls, desperately tries to equalise her footing, but the ship is determined to throw her off. 

She falls again, and her back slams into the floor. She stands, effortlessly, never needing to inhale a breath that was never knocked out of her, poise readied and tense. 

This is no longer Moya. She processes that, thinks it over properly, but is not in control of her thoughts. She has not realised _that _. 

Ahead, there’s a window, the other side obscured with reflections. It is wide, narrow, and she realises she recognises it from Earth. A room the government had there. That thought, she processes properly, and then realises she is now in control of her thoughts. It is a true lucidity. 

She turns her hands over in front of her, counts the fingers once, and then again. It is a trick Crichton taught her if she ever lucid dreamed, something she wasn’t sure if she’d even had the capability for. 

And here she stands, aware, thinking, alert. She turns her hands over again, counting the fingers once more. 

A perfect ten, she joyfully concedes. _But the hands are not hers. _

They appear Sebacean, peach in colour, with shortly cropped fingernails underlined with dirt. They’re soft. Female, she knows that instinctively. Female Sebaceans always look softer to the touch. 

Looking upwards, she catches her reflection in the light of the window, illuminated and opaque to the point of it becoming a mirror. She blinks at the light, and squints a little, knowing the face she sees looking back is familiar, before it finally occurs to her that it’s the mechanic from Khurtanan. 

The one who’d just wanted to help Moya. 

The one she’d endangered after revealing her gender. 

_ The one she’d nearly gotten killed. _

The shine on the window clears, the obnoxious lighting miraculously gone. She sees herself on the other side, her real form, in bed with the mechanic. 

She blinks. 

They’re happy and laughing and suddenly Chiana realises she can't hear them through the wall. She tries to will the sound into existence, and her efforts are returned with a deafening roar of muddled sound that drops her to her knees instantly. She screams, hands clamped over her ears, eyes tightly shut, and wakes up. 

Chiana jolts upward violently, hands clawing at sheets she didn't realise she’d even grabbed. She doesn't remember anything specific, and it aggravates her so, _so _much because she feels like she just realised something important. 

It’s only later in the day, helping Noranti out with some foul-smelling herbal concoction, that she abruptly remembers the whole thing. She curses loudly, eyes wide, mouth agape, and Noranti just laughs. 

\-- 

It’s night-time, or at least some approximate of it according to her tired body when Chiana finds herself wandering the halls of Moya, unable to sleep. It’s too hot in her quarters, some stupid creature had gotten into the vents and poor Moya and Pilot, were, as usual, between the two of them, trying to fix the repercussions of the day’s activities. 

She hears laughter coming from the bridge, Aeryn’s velvety cadence spilling out, unsurprisingly followed by Crichton’s own response. She lingers for a moment, long enough to hear the focal point of their discussion, Scorpius’ spy, that dark haired captain who dotes on the half-breed. Crichton laughs again with an added inclusion of another pop culture reference Chiana doesn't understand, but Aeryn’s eager response implies she interprets the joke perfectly. 

Chiana feels oddly voyeuristic standing there, cheeks flushing a soft hue. She’s listened in to Aeryn and Crichton before, sometimes deliberately, mostly accidentally. (Crichton still didn’t seem to quite understand how bad his human hearing was, and had continued to speak louder than needed even after all the cycles he’d been aboard.) The tenderness of the whole scene inevitably reminds her of D’Argo, and she hates that she still immediately thinks of him at times like this, forcing her mind to tear itself away, to do anything but think of their quiet conversations, domestic words spilled over dirtied sheets, jokes whispered at inopportune times. 

With a renewed energy to distract herself, she listens in properly, preferring that than another night alone, stuck in her own head, and immediately regrets it. 

Crichton makes some joke about the spy, down on his knees for Scorpius, that’s overwhelmingly sexual in delivery, and Aeryn laughs instantly. 

Chiana winces. 

She knows they mean no ill will, at least in the discriminatory aspect, and were she feeling any different, on any other day, she knows too well she would’ve joined in. But as it is, she can't help but feel uncomfortable. It’s not their intent to rile her, but she’s too easily reminded of that foul soap on that human Earth. There's no aggressive malice, but she can't help but feel it as an undercurrent regardless. 

Aeryn’s probably never even had to think about that approach, she realises, almost jealously. For Sebaceans, and especially Peacekeepers, same-gender relationships weren’t a problem. Chiana acknowledges Aeryn only sees the joke as one of command and submission, but _Crichton_ must see more, mustn’t he? Some part of his brain had to register the connotations, somewhere, the simple joke divided into multiple levels that perhaps only his subconscious was aware of. 

Maybe that frelled-up Scorpius, somewhere in his head had bought it to light, sometime? Though he was gone now, leaving Crichton to make surface level jokes on the bridge. 

As unnoticed as she arrived, Chiana slips away again, back to the corridors and the hallways of the leviathan she had become used to calling home. That could change though, someday. 


End file.
